Practice
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Pilgrimage Hiking
Walking in nature is a very healthy thing to do. It’s exercise, it fills your lungs with good air and your eyes with beauty, it reduces stress and blood pressure and depression. It is a sacred activity and, all by itself, constitutes an “informal” Atheopagan ritual. This article is about adding a symbolic, ritual dimension to a hike in nature: turning a walk into a pilgrimage to a special place with meaning and significance. Here’s how: 1. Identify a destination for your hike: a spring, a pool, a waterfall, a rock formation, a particular stand of trees, a mountaintop, a spectacular overlook. 2. Decide what that destination stands for (a theme…
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Rituals Are Important. But They Aren’t Activism.
In times like these, those of us who are of sound mind and values know: we must do something. In Atheopaganism, we believe in the power and necessity of human ritual. We understand the science about why rituals work, and why they are important to us. We celebrate the turning of the seasons and personal and familial milestones in life, and we conduct rituals to focus our attention, our intention, and our future activity in pursuit of our goals. It’s important and meaningful stuff. However, we also understand that ritual’s effect is the transformation of consciousness: more specifically, the transformation of the consciousnesses of the ritual’s participants. It is powerful and effective…
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Requiem and Invocation
Friends and Allies, let us grieve. Let us grieve that an era of progress and forward thinking appears to be drowning in a sea of ignorance, hatred and fear. Let us grieve that reason has been swamped by credulity, and science by superstition and willful ignorance. Let us grieve. Let us tear the words from the walls of our bodies, howling: we have lost so much. The children suffer. The good green Earth bleeds. The water is sullied, the creatures die, the air itself stifles the living of the world. The people are punished for being themselves. Our leaders are dupes and psychopaths. They hate this good world as much…
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Why I Don’t Write Ritual Scripts
I’m asked pretty frequently for sample Atheopagan group (as opposed to solitary) ritual scripts, and I never deliver them. Here’s why. I don’t write ritual scripts. I have hardly ever been to a group ritual where leaders/facilitators “read their lines” (or had obviously memorized them) that didn’t feel like a waste of my time, and I don’t want my rituals to be like that. I want them to be engaged and juicy and alive. Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe in ritual structure, and I don’t think rituals should just consist of people “winging it”. Preparation is necessary. Knowing the concepts and images that you want to communicate is important.…
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The Sun Broom—A Ritual Tool
The Sun broom is both a Midsummer ritual and a tool you can use ritually around the year. You will need: A piece of tree branch for a handle. Don’t hurt a tree; go for a hike and find something that has already fallen to the ground. Thin ribbon or strong twine for binding grasses to the handle. A bunch of long strands of dry grass. I harvest the grass at the height of the day on Midsummer—the peak of the power of the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere. In my particular area, wild oats grow very tall, so I use those, mostly. I bind them to the handle with…
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A Still and Sacred Moment
When we create rituals, we define a separate condition, a special state of being within which our intentions, our aspirations and our ritual activities are expressed. The common term for this condition is “sacred space”. There are many ways to create sacred space. Among the most common is the concept of “creating a container”, which is often done by drawing or pretending to draw a circle around the area where the ritual will take place. This is an element of the beginning phase of a ritual, which I have termed Arrival. It contributes to the establishment of the ritual state of consciousness, and to the sense of security and presence which that…
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Loving the World: An Atheopagan Sex Magic Primer for May Day (NSFW)
CONTENT WARNING: This post contains frank discussion of sexuality, and is meant for adults. If you’re not one, please stop reading and go elsewhere. … … … … … … … … Loving the World: An Atheopagan Sex Magic Primer for May Day (NSFW) Spring is often thought of as the season of sex. Trees and plants are flowering, birds are nesting, and the weather finally warms up enough that people wear less clothing and thoughts turn to desire. It’s now April, coming up on May Day, which is the Sabbath celebration the metaphorical meanings of which include sexuality, attainment of adulthood and celebration of sensual pleasures. This is a time-honored…
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How’s that Maypole Thing Work?
Merry May! I thought I’d write a post about Maypoles because many people want to do Maypole rituals for May Day but don’t know the details. So here goes… First, you’re going to need a pole at least 12′ long and 5″ in diameter. These dimensions are important: you need to embed at least 18″ of the pole in the ground in order for it to be stable during the Maypole dance, and a pole of any narrower diameter will take FOREVER for the ribbons to be wrapped on the pole. Think about it: if every turn around the pole is only taking up a few inches of ribbon, you’ll…
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Substance Use, Background Noise, and Reenchanting the World
I’m drinking a beer as I write this. That’s not a big deal. I’m not drunk and I don’t intend to have another. But I’m sitting at my local with a laptop, and I’m surrounded by a typical Friday afternoon crowd, which will swell considerably after 5:00. People in my society drink. They drink alcohol, and they drink tremendous volumes of coffee. And quite a large number of them regularly smoke pot, too. I’m still getting used to the fact that it’s legal in California now, but I encounter the smell of burning weed so frequently that I don’t even register it any longer. And though the numbers are dropping,…
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Toward Atheopagan Mysteries
Sacred Mysteries were initiatory rituals or ritual cycles in the ancient world which revealed secret wisdom to participants. Some examples include the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece and the Mysteries of Dionysos in Rome, and the initiatory mystery religion of Mithraism, also from the Roman period. These rituals and ritual cycles were characterized by solemn oaths of silence, so many of the secrets revealed in them are now lost, or can only be pieced together through comments made by initiates who later converted to Christianity and rejected their prior pagan experiences. Modern Pagan practitioners have resurrected some of these Mystery initiation traditions by creating new rituals that draw on the symbology and what is known…
